Why Underscores is The Best Foundation For Your WordPress Theme

Versatile Starter Theme To Create Your Perfect Site

Choose a starter theme like Underscores as the foundation for your website design template. It will save you 1,000 hours in development time.

WordPress is widely regarded as being the most user-friendly and popular CMS platform on which to build your website or blog. It is an incredibly powerful and robust system, which makes it easy to create static pages or posts, add widgets and attach multiple plug-ins. WordPress is so versatile that it can suit the needs of any type of site, from bloggers and small businesses, all the way up to Fortune 500 companies such as eBay or Reuters News. With tens of thousands of WordPress themes available to match the style of your site, it can feel overwhelming to know where to begin. An excellent starting point would be to use Underscores as the foundation system for your template.

What Is Underscores?

Underscores (also called _S) is a solid framework which many web developers use as a base to build their website on. It comes with lightweight code upon which you can add your own CSS elements. It is also possible to customise your own theme through the Advanced Functions facility.

Underscores should be considered as a foundation to your theme, rather than a finished product. It is expected that the theme should be tinkered with to obtain the desired results for your site. Other foundation themes are known as parent themes which can be extended to match the needs of a site. However, Underscores’s versatility allows you to create a brand new theme of your own, almost from scratch.

The Benefits Of Using Underscores

When you install Underscores, the theme is so lean that your development team can get started on building your site immediately. Unlike with other themes, there is very little to remove before getting started on your own project.

It also has the benefit of being endorsed by Automattic who are the company behind WordPress. Teams of SEO Consultancy and WordPress designers will feel comforted using Underscores, knowing that the theme and all updates going forward will adhere to codex standards and will be compatible with the CMS giant.

Why Use A Starter Theme?

With thousands of WordPress themes to choose from, it is common for site owners to consider whether they should buy a theme straight out of the box or build their own using a starter theme such as Underscores.

The team behind this theme claim that Underscores will save you 1,000 hours of development time. Rather than having to code WordPress files from scratch, the starter theme already has the core mechanisms in place to run a dynamic site. However, the theme is basic enough that you can start to build your own vision of a site immediately. It is essentially the perfect happy medium.

The contributors behind Underscores are passionate about its existence and form a large digital community online. These include WordPress contributors, Automattic employees and plugin developers to name a few. Because of this large community, it is unlikely that Underscores has a shelf life and will continue to be supported with the latest WordPress features for the foreseeable future.

If you are looking to transfer your existing site over to WordPress, or wish to build a new site, then Underscores is the way to go.